This year’s Oscars were celebrated in high style chez Von Deren. There was much rejoicing, which I credit first to the success of our boeuf bourguignon (and the flowing vin rouge), but second to a surprising turn of events — the Academy spurned James Cameron’s latest billion-dollar behemoth (you know the one, with the blue people), bestowing its highest honors of Best Director and Best Picture on Kathryn Bigelow and her film The Hurt Locker. Every year I obstinately pick the film I think is best, and for once I got that one right on the Oscar pool!

A taut, unsentimental drama that mines the adrenaline, suspense, and psychological trauma of modern warfare in equal turns, The Hurt Locker was one of the standout films of 2009 for me. I saw it upon its June release in a half-empty indie theater, and expected it to sadly fade away as small, excellent films often do. But turns out she’s got legs after all! In this year’s race The Hurt Locker was the Little Indie That Could, earning a measly $15 mil at the box office (popcorn money compared to Avatar’s global billions) but riding a wave of critical acclaim all the way to Oscar triumph. I’m hoping the awards’ media-heavy recognition will finally bring the film the audience it deserved all along.

More importantly, Kathryn Bigelow was only the fourth woman ever nominated for, and the first to win, a Best Director Academy Award. Previous nominees are Sofia Coppola for Lost In Translation (2003), Jane Campion for The Piano (1996), and the resplendently named Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von BraueichI (a.k.a. Lina Wertmüller) for Seven Beauties (1977). I had hoped for a slightly more eloquent speech but Bigelow chose not to acknowledge the historic nature of her win in her acceptance. Truth be told, she seemed somewhat flabbergasted, clutching the golden statuettes as if Cameron himself was going to swoop onstage and wrest them from her grip. This body language belied her usually stoic refusal to talk about herself (and her struggles in Hollywood) in terms of gender. Her quiet but stubborn insistence that she is not a female director, but simply a director, has been a bandied about on blogs and op-ed columns as if Bigelow and The Hurt Locker are a referendum on the status of women in Hollywood. But she’s too complicated a figurehead to elect for any sort of a feminist film movement; she’s a smart director who happens to make action movies with violent sequences and few female characters; does this render her masculine, feminine, or neuter? Damned if I know.

What I do know is that as we raised a glass to Kathryn Bigelow it reminded me of the night Barack Obama was elected — it felt like a beginning, a turning of a page, and I’m curious to see how this shift will carry forward. As Manohla put it, “it’s too early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so good.” Hear hear, sister!